Rolling R&B 2016

new Lloyd is nice and fizzy https://youtu.be/OiuxlwDWpBU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCSDsieKkx0

R&B group produced by Super Furry Animals' Cian Ciaran.

lmfaoooooo i originally thought the lyric in usher's "rivals" was 'call your baby that's only on Tidal' -_________-

album's got some (other) good trax

yeah it sounds pretty good? maybe w/o the standout tracks of looking 4 myself but w/o the garish genre hopping

I like the Usher album and really hope that the prolonged Tinashe-Dream collabo thing actually works out for her. What else is there to look forward to in 2016?

more banal longneck posts?

Sorry. Im Sorry. Im trying to remove it

.........
Let me rephrase the question. Where do you guys go to find out about upcoming releases? I tried searching for fall 2016 r&b albums and came up with basically nothing outside of a tba tinashe.

the usher album's a funny one. i found it simultaneously intriguing and insipid, before it ultimately dwindled away into the unmemorable. hard ii love!! i guess it seems an accurate reflection of the bright n trite wanderings of a post-relevant prodigy who never really got to become a particularly interesting person? (oh cool a horrible bust of me, i'll put it on the cover. it's flawed, that's interesting. we all have flaws.)

he's like a sort of jet set gap year tourist at this point - well-mannered, inquisitive, fleetingly engaged but m/l detached from the emotional current. each track has an attentive intricacy to it that adds up to a sort of light charm but not much more. it's not uncreative, in its way. it has a vague cohesion, of sorts. on the radio 'rivals' felt to me like the realest since confessions, but here it's just surface, no ache or sensuousness or whatever. on 'missing u' he sings "i miss you girl!!" exactly like he does on 'throwback', but it's just empty. feels like there are lot of moments like that here, where you can't tell between subtle callback and blank reflex memory.

i'm guessing a few other of these tracks would perk up ears out of album context too; 'crash', 'fwm' have a enjoyable low key bounce like 'show me'. 'bump'/'let me' (and 'no limit' preceding too by extension i suppose) forms a nice kind of abstracted atl tribute suite that suggests a vacuum-pack ciara

i dunno, it passes the time. there's no desperation or cynicism here, which is fairly admirable. i wouldn't want the "garish genre hopping" as j0rd correctly describes of the prev album all over again but there was at least a glee to it. [adam scott face moment before delivering "are we having fun yet"] Usher is No Longer Looking 4 Himself, And That's Okay (Meh Though)

quite enjoyed that nyt style profile recently where he's all up on visvim and his metal pouch for keeping crystals. "Normally I’ll put a labradorite or rose quartz in the pouch — anything I feel like I need at the time."

New Bell Biv Devoe slaps

― Evan R, Tuesday, 13 September 2016 15:28 Bookmark

one of the ways you can tell e.r is an industry plant is that "slaps" is literally the only possible word u couldve deployed to put a positive bay-area-nostalgia-bubble spin on a track that's pointlessly senile in any other context. kudos!

you saw right through me

usher album is one of those records where the songs sound minor out of context but then together they make more sense, but still the album itself can't also help but feel... minor as well, just slightly less baffling to think about from an A&R perspective. the one thing that's weird to me is why the album is so serious and morose. it's still an agreeable R&B album so it's not even like art-y serious like say anti (ugly bust on the album cover aside), but i thought "good kisser" & "don't mind" (plus even the "blurred lines" rip off w/ nicki) fit him better thematically than a lot of what is on here, even if those songs weren't amazing or anything (i consider "don't mind" canon tho).

i do think "bump" is pretty sick though, even tho the part at the end where "love you down" floats on by makes me wish he had just recorded a bass track just for the fuck of it. also the 8 min song at the end somehow justifies itself.

yeah i think i saw some words like brooding and seductive written about it and idk maybe it was just me but the album's emotional scale kinda p much passed me by in its entirety, never mind what registers where on it. just seemed like expert exercises in style like i was on the other side of the booth glass observing the whole thing done in one take, not much depth of stagecraft to it

Usher already feels like a relic from another era, alas

describes the knock on urshers whole body of work. xp

noticing that No Limit is a carbon copy of Jeremih Planes

he sounds great on the title track

half of this record sounds p great

I just noticed on the Wiki page that he's got two solo songwriting credits.

oh nice he wrote the 8 minute track. dream/tricky produced bump

xp that would explain why i like no limit so much!

I'mm not cool with Usher and Rubén Blades attempt to write their own "Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman."

the "fwm" "rivals" "tell me" run is by far the highlight of the album. "crash" is also kinda great (tho it was a bit too subtle for radio). i still don't like "no limit" and even its sonic similarity to "planes" does little but remind me of how superior the latter is, even considering the turd guest rap. much of the rest of the album is passable production in service of songs that are not quiiite there.

FYM probs my top choice off this atm

i'm amused that the album opens with him saying "i fucked up. i'm man enough to admit it... but i don't know if it makes a difference." reminds me of the spoken "i hope you can accept that i'm man enough to tell you [that i have impregnated another woman]" from "confessions pt. 2" (prob the most ridiculous lyric of his career, like brah, it's not how man you are that'll be the hard part to accept!!). in light of that this almost seems like #personalgrowth until it descends into that cringe-inducing 'conversation' w/ priyanka chopra (why?)

looking 4 myself definitely did have a couple of truly awful tracks but its highs were high enough to compensate. its typical tracks were of a higher standard than the typical tracks from this one alas.

i do wish "let me" had taken more influence from the inoj version of "love you down" rather than the ready for the world orig lol

I might be in the other boat. The last two or three Usher records all had sensational highs, but they also had some truly dreadful missteps that completely pulled me out of them and made them almost impossible to get through as complete works. I'm happy to sacrifice some highs if it means getting rid of those lows; I like having an Usher record I can play start to finish.

Glad there's no mock "Blurred Lines" or Chris Brownstep dance tracks here. Or Nicki tracks where he pressures an uneasy fan into a barely consensual threesome or whatever.

Also the singles blend really seamlessly into the album here, which hasn't been the case for a while. "Crash" sounds awesome in context

^^^^

the industry strikes back. a complete start-to-finish work of seamless... what?

seems like it's... hard ii love

oh wait rtc already made that joke

a complete start-to-finish work of seamless... what?

Really inviting, easygoing, interestingly produced R&B songs from one of the genre's all-time most charismatic singers?

http://i.imgur.com/ISMRaDT.gif

https://twitter.com/yxngdinnerpxrty/status/683350656221089792

loooooooooooooooooool so good

charisma is a p interesting sales tactic wrt ursh given it's long been my impression that he is strikingly unbeloved in proportion to his fame (i. for the last decade, at least ii. among r&b heartlands iii. excluding any criminal/degenerate peers)

obv there is pop culture charisma as public persona and there is on-record charisma as expressive conduit etc but let's not pretend they're mutually exclusive

xpost haaaaa that's great.

Andy K likes the Usher album and doesn't like the Fantasia album. So in 2016 I'm considering maybe not forming any opinions about anything.

boxedjoy you should start that thread

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEF-8N-Y3SY

Both r&b and hip hop but the new Tink is amazing

That "sorry I've been gone but I've been going through some challenges highly specific to a mid-tier major label recording artist" Lloyd song is actually getting airtime on my local rap station. I did not expect that.

i rly love that song now

It works way better on the radio than I'd have thought, but the old-man Ginuwine vibes still throw me off. Feels like Lloyd aged about 20 years since his last single.

Playlist is updated.

The Ty Dolla Sign tape is tight.

the songs that sound like the last album are good, the songs that sound like modern rap radio are bad

actually i suspect a good bit of it might be leftover from the free tc sessions, some of the credits/sounds seem pretty similar i.e. tish hyman also wrote this record's "horses in the stable" rip off

I like the songs that sound like modern rap radio. They've got bounce and feel luxurious, partly due to the production, partly to Ty's songwriting and partly due to the harmonizing.